In the recent years an increasing number of vehicles are being equipped with monitoring systems that supervise the way the vehicle is being driven, by capturing real-time data and providing the driver of the vehicle with objective evaluation, thereby enabling him/her to determine the quality of his/her driving performance. Monitoring systems are mainly used to confirm the safety of the driver performance by facilitating the collection of qualitative and quantitative information related to factors that contribute to the occurrence of accidents. Installing monitoring systems in vehicles have proved to assist in mitigating the probability of a vehicle being involved in an accident. In addition, monitoring systems may also be used to analyze other aspects of the driver's driving performances such as fuel consumption, driving habits etc.
There are several monitoring systems and methods to utilize them that are known in the art. Most of the systems described in the art classify the driver safety performance based upon measurements taken by sensors installed in the vehicle being driven. The sensors may provide information regarding the speed, time, acceleration, location of the vehicle and so on. The basic monitoring systems use a simple threshold mechanism. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,438,472 describes a system that analyzes raw driving data (such as speed and acceleration data) in a statistical fashion to obtain statistical aggregates that can be used to evaluate the driver's performance. Unsatisfactory driver behavior is determined when certain predefined threshold values are exceeded. Driver, whose behavior exceeds a statistical threshold from a pre-defined “safe” driving, is deemed to be a “dangerous” driver.
Another solution is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,389,178, which is incorporated herein by reference, by which a somewhat more sophisticated monitoring system is described. The underlying idea of the solution suggested by U.S. Pat. No. 7,389,178 is that an ordinary statistical threshold-based analysis mechanism fails to recognize dangerous driving patterns. Thus, the monitoring system disclosed in this publication dismantles a driving session into a plurality of maneuvers (e.g. lane changing, making turns etc.) and provides a safety score for each maneuver based on the performance of that maneuver by the driver, which is derived from related parameters values as measured by the sensors.
Yet, it is still required to improve on the available solutions for evaluating drivers' performances.